“I see,” he concluded, in a resigned tone, “you are making a joke of these matters, so we will not pursue the subject; but now that we are on shore fresh from our voyage, I wish to ask seriously your deliberate opinion whether you would advise any one to take the trip just for the pleasure of the journey itself?”
In the northern part of Minnesota is the greatest elevation of what geologists denominate the eastern water-shed of our continent; lying almost exactly in the centre of North America, here the streams that flow to the north, east, and south, find their source. Lake Superior, that adjoins this section on the east, is the chief of those magnificent lakes that empty from one another into the St. Lawrence, and finally wash the coast of Labrador. The Mississippi, taking its rise in the same region and but a few miles away, flows southward with ever increasing volume to the Gulf of Mexico, and then sweeping around Florida and through the Atlantic, rejoins the waters of Lake Superior off Newfoundland; while the Red River of the North, pursuing a contrary course, empties into Hudson’s Bay and thence into the Northern Ocean. These waters, starting from little rills and springs scarcely more than a few steps apart, after wandering thousands of miles asunder come together and commingle in the Northern Atlantic Ocean.
Here were the famous Indian portages. One from Lake Superior through Pigeon River, Sturgeon Lake, and Rainy River into the Lake of the Woods, has served to locate the boundary between two great nations, and is the native highway between Hudson’s River and Hudson’s Bay. Another through Brulé River leads into the head waters of the Mississippi, and thence, by ascending the Missouri, to the rivers that empty into the Pacific Ocean. These portages were traversed year after year by the aboriginal inhabitants, who have left their tracks in the well-worn paths that are still followed by the voyageurs, and are suggestive of easy grades to those who wish to bind our country together by paddle-wheel and railroad track.
Lake Superior, with a surface six hundred feet above, and a bottom three hundred feet below the level of the sea, stretches out in vastness and splendor five hundred miles long by nearly two hundred broad, and holds in its bosom islands that would make respectable kingdoms in the old world. On the southern shore its sandstone rocks are worn by the waves and storms into fantastic shapes, imitative of ancient castles or modern vessels, or are hollowed out into deep caverns; on the north the bolder shore rises into rugged mountains whose face has been seamed by the moving ice-drift of former ages. In the country bordering upon the south are located inexhaustible mines of copper and iron of immense value; and along the northern coast are found agates and precious stones.